Starting Sunday, the Chinese government will take on a huge challenge — imposing a smoking ban in all indoor public venues in a country with 350 million smokers and a deep-rooted tobacco culture.

The ban, which was announced by the Ministry of Health in March, applies to bars, restaurants and hotels, but not to workplaces. Authorities are touting it as a major step toward reducing smoking in the world’s most tobacco-addicted country, but they have not specified penalties for violations or how the law will be enforced.

“I don’t think this policy will make much difference,” one smoker in Shanghai told BBC News. “Particularly in the smaller cities in the countryside, where smoking is more part of the culture.”

China ratified the World Health Organization’s Framework Convention on Tobacco Control in 2003, pledging measures to curb tobacco use. But according to a recent report by an international panel of experts, the tobacco industry has been successful in sabotaging anti-smoking efforts. The report predicted that deaths from cigarette smoking in China will triple in the next two decades, killing some 3.5 million people annually by 2030.

Under the new ban, cigarette vending machines will be prohibited in public areas in China and business owners will be required to post conspicuous no-smoking signs. The Health Ministry’s goal is to have no smoke and no smoking-related advertising in any public area by 2020. “I don’t know about the ban,” a longtime smoker told the Xinhau news agency. “I’m very addicted to the habit.”

Forbes’ China Tracker blog also is skeptical. “In the lead-up to the Olympics in 2008, Beijing announced a similar smoking ban — and everyone completely ignored it,” blogger Patrick Chovanec wrote. Chinese authorities, he added, “seem to regard smoking as one of life’s little pleasures that it’s best not to mess with.”

Yang Gonghuan, deputy director of the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention, said that raising public awareness of the dangers of smoking is the key to success. “Without a successful mass campaign, tobacco control is doomed to fail,” she said.

A 2010 survey co-authored by the Chinese CDC found that less than a quarter of the Chinese population believes smoking causes disease like lung cancer, and fewer than one-sixth of the country’s smokers plan to kick the habit.

U.S. labor investigators recovered $240.8 million in back wages for American workers last year amid an intensified crackdown on pay abuses in low-skill industries.

That newly released total – which reflects the amount of back wages that employers agreed to pay, or were ordered to pay, following government investigations – amounted to $890 per affected worker.

However, a recent report prepared for the Labor Department suggests that the back wage recoveries only scratch the surface of what underpaid workers actually are owed.

The report by Eastern Research Group, issued in December, estimated that in California and New York alone, minimum wage violations in 2011 cost workers at least $32.7 million a week—or about $1.7 billion a year. At least 50,000 families in the two states suffered income losses due to minimum wage violations, and at least 14,800 families were brought below the poverty level, the report found.

An attempted crackdown on wage and hour violations on two Oregon berry farms has ended in a retreat by the U.S. Labor Department, which dropped all charges against two growers it had accused of failing to pay the minimum wage to about 1,000 workers.

The case has brought scrutiny to one of the Labor Department’s most potent weapons—the “hot goods” provision of federal law that allows it to halt the interstate shipment of goods produced in violation of wage laws. It is often used to fight alleged wage theft in the garment industry, among others.

With an estimated $5.5 million dollars worth of highly perishable blueberries on the line, the Oregon farms–Pan American Berry Growers and B&G Ditchen LLC–were threatened with a court order during their 2012 harvest. It would have barred them from shipping their produce unless they paid back

A father and his 2-year-old son at a gun rights demonstration last March in Austin, Texas (Photo by Erika Rich)

After being thwarted in Congress following the 2012 school shooting rampage in Newtown, Conn., gun control activists have scored some important victories in states around the country.

One of the biggest wins came in Washington State. In November, voters by a wide margin approved a state ballot measure extending, to gun shows and other private firearms transactions, a requirement for buyer background checks.

But which side has the momentum in the struggle around the nation pitting advocates of tighter controls against supporters of expanded gun rights? That remains a tough call.

With the clash now a state-by-state fight, the dueling camps make competing claims about who has gained ground and who figures to fare better in the years immediately ahead.